German Jewry and the Allure of the
Sephardic. By John M. Efron (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
Pp. 352. Hardcover, $45.00.

While German and
Polish Jews were culturally the same until the early eighteenth century, the
advent of Hasidism, which never gained purchase with German Jews, swept through
Polish Jewry like a storm. This created two distinct forms of Ashkenazim (Jews
of Central or Eastern European ancestry) – the Hasidic Polish Jews who remained
in poverty and the German Jews who experienced a period of embourgeoisement
during their quest for emancipation. To that end, John M. Efron’s German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic
is about “the German-Jewish quest to be seen as dignified, as refined, as
physically appealing” in a journey through the late-eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.[1]
The title may lead to assumptions that many German Jews were concerned with the
Sephardim (medieval Jews of Iberian ancestry). To be clear, many German Jews
were more concerned with occidentalization to better fit in with their Gentile
neighbors as opposed to orientalization while they were adopting middle class
values. However, Efron explains that it was the “elites who molded Jewish
popular opinion in Germany” that saw a particular allure in the medieval
Sephardim as a way to enhance all of German Jewry in the eyes of non-Jews.[2]
These elites were the driving force behind a new wave of German Jewish identity
formation, and their constant invocation of the Sephardic Jews, the Golden Age,
and Islam played a significant role in transforming modern German Jewry.[3]

Such a study
lends itself well to the idea of orientalism because of the Islamic influence
on the Iberian Peninsula. Edward Said’s canonical work Orientalism is a useful lens through which to interpret European
literature and history, but often by being repurposed, adapted, and expanded.
Indeed, the best and most effective way to critique Said is to expand on the
framework and fill in the gaps. For Said, orientalism heavily relied on British
and French imperialism, but Efron seeks to expand this perception, claiming
that orientalism can also include an appreciation for certain oriental styles
in culture, architecture, dress, and appearance. Perhaps more significantly,
however, German Jews could look to the Orient for “lessons about tolerance and
acceptance.”[4]
Beyond this, however, Efron fails to specifically address why the cult of the
Sephardic Jews was so appealing.

To this end,
Efron organizes his book topically over five chapters, each a focal point of
the German Jewish elite reformers: language, aesthetics, architecture,
literature, and scholarship. Chapter 1 addresses the modernization of the way
German Jews spoke. Leading members of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment)
were deeply concerned with developing a secularized and modern version of
Hebrew. The maskilim (the followers or adherents of the Haskalah) rejected the
Ashkenazic style of pronunciation because it was too reminiscent of Yiddish, a
language many German Jews were abandoning in favor of pure German. Instead, the
maskilim advocated for the Sephardic style of pronunciation. Moses Mendelssohn,
perhaps the most well-known German-Jewish philosopher, took up the challenge to
replace the vulgar and unaccultured Yiddish spoken by the Ashkenazim with pure,
biblical Hebrew that had been spoken by Sephardic Jews. What resulted was not
really Sephardic, but a blend of the Sephardic and Ashkenazic languages. Most
significant, however, is not the linguistics of modern Hebrew, but the
demonstration of German Jewry’s desire to improve their language, which to them
reflected inner moral health and outward physical appearance, and remake their
culture “in the image of an imagined (and better) Jewish Other.”[5]

Chapter 2
similarly examines the aesthetics of German Jewry as envisioned by the
maskilim. Coupled with anthropologists and ethnographers, the maskilim
determined that the Sephardim were the closest representation and supposedly
the true descendants of the Israelites and therefore the most physically
beautiful Jews in stark contrast to the eastern Ashkenazim. The suggestion was
that even the most caricatured Eastern European Jew could become just as
beautiful as the Sephardic Jew of the Middle Ages with the proper education and
language skills. Another significant link between language and aesthetics was
the belief that the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew was the authentic
language of the ancient Israelites. Chapter 3 also concerns Jewish beauty, but
this time focusing on the architectural realm, viewing buildings as reflections
of value and self-perception. German Jews began to build synagogues in a
neo-Moorish style to reflect their exploration into a new oriental identity.
Efron explores in detail synagogues in Dresden, Leipzig, Vienna, and Berlin,
which embraced both the duality of a German and Jewish identity longing for the
Sephardic and the symbolic rejection of Ashkenazic synagogues through the new
architecture. Interestingly, the neo-Moorish designs that became so popular
were built in an imagined Sephardic style, but the leading German Jews wanted a
convincing way to answer questions of Jewish origins in ancient Israel, the Jewish
diaspora, and “the nature of German-Jewish identity.”[6]

Chapters 4 and 5
elucidate two closely related genres: historical literature and scholarship.
The commonalities between the two are perhaps best exemplified by one of the
most prominent maskili, Heinrich Heine. Heine wrote novellas and poetry using
the historical experience of the Marranos, or Christianized Jews in medieval
Spain contemporary to the Sephardic Jews, as an analogy for German Jewry – the
Marranos were not just historical reflections, but self-portraits of the new
Ashkenazim stuck between two worlds, straddling a line of multiple identities.
Other scholars in the maskilic tradition, such as Abraham Geiger, the founding
father of the Jewish reform movement; Heinrich Graetz, the most influential
Jewish historian of the nineteenth century; and Ignaz Goldziher, a leading
Jewish scholar of Islam, also focused on the orientalist connections between
Islam and the Spanish-Jewish past that was constructed by Jewish historians.

In elucidating
how German Jews turned to a specific type of orientalism for the purposes of
identity formation, Efron demonstrates that British and French imperialists did
not have a monopoly on orientalism. The Ashkenazic orientalists in Germany did
not look to the modern Middle East and North Africa as places for imperialism,
but rather to a mythic past during the Golden Age of the Sephardic Jews in
medieval Spain for inspiration as an example of lessons on tolerance and
acceptance. On the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim rule, the Sephardic Jews
(allegedly) flourished. The whole book would be best read as an extension and
reworking of Said and an orientalist mindset more broadly even if it is more
frequently implied rather than stated outright, while keeping in mind that such
a singular focus on Said should not cloud the connections and rupture between
German and Eastern European Jewries and the inner mentality of German Jews.
This book is an excellent addition to the historiography of German Jewry for
specialists, and any graduate seminar on Modern Europe would be remiss to
overlook it.

Shawn M. Reagin

Georgia State
University

[1]
John M. Efron, German Jewry and the
Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2016), 1.

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